because it's hard to shut me up.

Category Archives: Wisdom

Over the last few weeks we have heard an onslaught of accusations and allegations of sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, and sexual harassment against famous and powerful men. Power players in Hollywood, politicians, comedians and actors, and now even well-known journalists and newsmen.

As a former victim of sexual abuse, you would think that I would rejoice to see the powerful brought low for their crimes against the powerless and the helpless, for their abuse of their power and how they use their money to cover up their crimes and silence their victims.

Strangely, no.

Instead I am disheartened and hurt.

Bill Cosby was a childhood hero, a funny man who made my parents and I laugh; a man who made me believe that good old family values transcended race and economic status.

Charlie Rose was a journalist and newsman that I felt restored integrity to the trade by avoiding infotainment and sticking to the actual news, reported with honesty, focusing on what was already known and not wild conjecture.

Al Franken was a comedian whose comedy I adored (ah, Stuart Smalley…you are good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people do like you!). I tended to agree with his politics, and I respected his choice to give up a lucrative career in entertainment to enter the ugly world of politics. I had high hopes that he would bring a voice of reason to what had become a highly conservative and reactionary Congress.

All fallen…them and a dozen more.

It hurts my heart to have trusted and believed in the integrity of men who proved unworthy of my faith and my admiration. And yet…

I am reminded of the mighty statue with feet of iron and clay in Daniel 2:21-45. In this passage Daniel interprets a dream for Nebuchadnezzer, and he tells him:

“As you saw the feet and toes partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom; but some of the strength of iron shall be in it, as you saw the iron mixed with the clay. As the toes of the feet were part iron and part clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly brittle.”

I think Daniel might actually be describing the American government as it currently stands, but that is another blog post entirely.

Traditionally, the saying “feet of clay” is meant to convey the fragility of power and the ways that the powerful often fall when their flaws and weaknesses—their feet of clay—are exposed. The weak clay, unable to hold up the gilded image of themselves they have projected to the people, breaks, and down they fall, disgraced and broken.

The mighty are often slain on a sword of their own making.

This has been weighing heavily on my heart for an entire week.

Then this morning I went to yoga. Yoga is an interesting workout because it is simultaneously active and meditative; you focus on your breath and on honoring your body and its limits while pushing that same body to the edges of its limits and holding it there.

Strength in peace and peace in strength all while honoring weakness and frailty. The perfect balance.

Our suggested intention for our practice was gratitude, and so I listed the things I am grateful for as I moved through the poses.

Family. Friends. A loving church family.

My husband. My children. The family that we have created. How that family has persisted in trial and trouble, and how we nurture each other during those times.

The health of my body. The chronic illness that keeps me humble and mindful of my limitations.

Gray hairs, and a life long enough to see them begin to sprout on my head.

Then I moved beyond the obvious and began to think of all that had been dragging me down the last few weeks. I decided to try and find gratitude even in that and was pleasantly surprised.

I am grateful to live in a nation where half the country hates the president but trusts that our nation is strong and steady enough to endure the effects of his administration and move on to elect a better/different/equally flawed leader in the next election cycle.

I am grateful to be a part of a culture that is changing and becoming unwilling to endure endemic racism and sexism. I am grateful to have born two children into a new generation that has no patience to wait for changes to slowly come over time; in their mind it must happen NOW.

I am truly grateful for a society that allows its leaders to fall, to repent, and to find grace and place in society again.

I was born in the early 1960s, a time in this country’s history when there was great social unrest: race riots; a president and his brother had been murdered; a great social leader had been assassinated. The whole country heaved and spasmed with change that lasted over several decades as people of color and women fought for equal rights and equal opportunities. It seemed like the fabric of our country was being torn into shreds.

Yet here we are, fighting even more battles as we uncover abuses of power and continued racial and sexual discrimination and abuse.

God has made us stronger than we realize, and our greatest blessing is that we can not only endure such painful change but grow and become better because of it.

So this Thanksgiving, after you express your gratitude for your obvious blessings, express a little gratitude for the mess that things seem to be at this moment because God is still working on that mess, and only God knows what good He will bring out of it.

This is a word you’ve probably seen pretty often lately, as it seems to be the latest technique for dealing with all sorts of ills: anxiety, eating disorders, stress management, addiction, emotional dysregulation, and depression just to name a few. Add meditation to the concept of mindfulness and you have just identified the hot, new trend for young, urban professionals.

There is nothing new about mindfulness or meditation. People have been practicing both for centuries. What has gained them both so much press is that medical professionals have come to recognize the power of both techniques for improving overall health (i.e. lowering blood pressure) and reducing pain; mental health professionals have long used these techniques to help their clients reduce impulsivity and act according to their values instead of the strong emotion of the moment, which is a powerful means of increasing self-esteem and the likelihood of choosing positive/effective actions.

All this to say, gee…this mindfulness and meditation thing sure is useful!

Despite the effectiveness of mindfulness and meditation, most of us are not using these techniques on a regular basis because they take time and effort to practice and master—and most of us don’t have enough time or energy to master even one more thing, so it Just. Isn’t. Happening.

My youngest daughter posted something on Facebook yesterday that really caught my attention. She said “If, when I was little, someone told me how much of life is going to work just so you can pay rent and taxes and be able to go to the doctor, I probably would have savored those years more.”

For just a moment I struggled with the urge to tell her that simple observation would have given her a clue if she had only bothered to pay attention to how much work her parents were doing!

I thought about accusing her of being bone-headedly stupid, but the truth is that I didn’t pay any more attention to the difficulties of adult life during my childhood than she did during hers. I decided that the problem is endemic to childhood and especially to being a teenager, and this reminded me of a specific morning when I was teaching Sunday School to a bunch of high school students.

That Sunday one of the boys in the class was complaining that his mother wanted him to help her clean the house just because he was on Spring Break. “If she wants to clean the house, then she should do it herself! Don’t make me something just because it’s what you want!” Then he repeated the mantra of children everywhere: “I can’t wait until I’m an adult. I’ll do whatever I want to do all the time!”

I kind of lost my composure for a moment and blurted out “Do you really think that your mother wants to clean the house?!” To my utter shock, he said yes. Still having no composure, I said “Are you on drugs?! NO ONE wants to clean the house! Ever!” He actually had the audacity to ask me why his mother cleaned the house if she didn’t want to do it, since she was an adult and therefore could do whatever she wanted to. So I explained to the class that adulthood is about doing the many things you have to do and need to do whether you want to do them or not…with occasional moments of ease when you get to do what you’d like to do. Then I pointed out that if their parents didn’t clean the house on a regular basis they would quickly be living in filth and unsafe conditions. Then I made it clear that neither their mothers nor their fathers particularly liked going to work every day, nor did they like paying bills, or doing yard work, or doing laundry. I told them that most parents would actually prefer to do the same things that their kids want to do all day: sleep in, play video games, hang out with friends, go shopping, watch a movie, and eat food that somebody else prepares. I made it clear that their parents were not getting to do what they wanted to do very often at all. I wish I could show you a picture of their crestfallen faces. I think I might be personally responsible for destroying their dreams of an adult life of ease, and I’m not sure that it was the kind thing to do since they had so little time left to indulge that dream.

I did post an answer to my daughter, admitting that her father and I tried to tell her how difficult adult life would be, and revealing that she was consistently unwilling to listen to that truth. I also let her know that she would say much the same thing once her children were born, except in reference to her life with her husband before children. I also told her that she would say the same thing again in reference to raising her children, once her nest became empty.

It’s that old adage: hindsight is 20/20. You only realize how good you had it after you no longer have it, whatever ‘it’ is. This is not news to anyone over the age of 20.

Except that I’m not sure that that this is how it’s supposed to be.

And this is where I return to the subject of mindfulness.

Our culture is so focused on productivity and problem-solving that our lives have become driven by our to-do lists. Each day becomes a marathon of trying to get it all done, with increasing levels of efficiency and task mastery as we grow older, which only lets us cram more onto our to-do list, at least until we reach our mid-60s and need to start slowing down a little.

You’ve heard this before, but I’ll say it again: we have become human doings instead of human beings.

I don’t have the solution to alleviate our busyness or our endless to-do lists, but I do have an idea about how to stop the endless cycle of looking backwards, longing for a chance to truly appreciate what good thing that we didn’t know we had, now that it’s gone. And no, I’m not going to try and sell you a meditation CD that will increase your levels of gratitude or insist that you sit with a raisin for five minutes, focusing on its texture and appearance, and then five more minutes giving yourself a chance to truly taste a raisin.

Can you tell that I am just a little frustrated by the ways that we teach mindfulness? I knew you could.

How about we just take a minute to pay attention to the good things in life?

I don’t mean the house/apartment/rented room you live in because that’s obvious, and if you aren’t grateful for the roof over your head, this blog isn’t going to do you any good. I understand that we often forget to be grateful for what we have, but that’s not what I trying to say. I’m trying to shoot at the root of what my daughter talked about in her FB post: the habit of only valuing the fullness of our life after that part of our life has passed.

This problem…this is a part of the human condition. We like to identify our material possessions and our relationships as our blessings (because it’s so obvious) and consign everything else to the ‘meh’ category, wishing we didn’t have to deal with it. But it’s the stuff in the ‘meh’ category that we will miss the most once it is gone.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

When you’re busy plunging, how often do you think about how fantastic it is to have a flush toilet that functions? We don’t thank God for the sewer system often enough.

When your life becomes an emotional mess, do you ever think about the ways that your challenges and struggles illustrate to you exactly who your friends are? Trust me, you’ll know who your real friends are because they will show up (either physically or emotionally) to give you support in the midst of your difficulty.

When you are stuck at home with bronchitis or the flu, do you spend any time thinking about your body and how hard it works to keep you going…and how infrequently it breaks down? Ask anyone with a chronic illness how quickly they came to appreciate their previous health and what they now call their ‘good days’…and you might suddenly realize just how many good days you have in the average year.

When you are refereeing a fight between your children, or arguing with your teenager, or grounding your tween for bad behavior, do you ever stop to think that these moments—these frustrating, disappointing moments—are the grist in the mill that will help your child become a decent adult?

You can complain about the crap in your life—and broken toilets and bad breakups and the flu and disobedient kids are crap—all that you want to. It’s okay to call it like you see it. Crap is crap. I’m not asking you to pretend that life is all rainbows and unicorns.

What I’m trying to say is that we need to become mindful of the goodness that is inherent in the daily crap in our life.

We need to take a solid minute to be grateful for the obvious blessings and then another two or three minutes to be grateful for just how crazy life is, for the things that frustrate us, challenge us, and make us exhausted. Trust me…in their absence we will look back and say “If I had only known…I would have savored those years more.”

Well…now you know. Savor the life you have NOW…not just the obvious blessings, but the whole doggone mess.

This is your mindfulness minute for the day. Thank you for reading. I’m going to go clean the dog poop out of my backyard, and think about how I wouldn’t have to do this if I didn’t have two little Shih Tzus who love me, love me, love me!

Not that everything has gone wrong this week. Far from it; in fact, many good things have happened this week. What has me feeling like an epic failure is that something went wrong with one of my clients—like wrong—and she quit therapy abruptly, which usually causes me to seriously question if I am burnt out, if I am in need of a tune-up of my skills, or if I am just slowly losing my mojo as a therapeutic person.

Obviously, I cannot share any specifics of what happened, since I want to (and legally need to) respect my client’s privacy. Let it suffice to say that we had a major parting of the ways over a religious issue; my client is very conservative and is an activist in this area, and I am a committed progressive that does not believe that my morals should ever dictate what other people are allowed to do. We have laws to dictate behavior; after that, my morals should stop with me.

I have to admit that I view this person as an extremist. I say that because she holds an ethical viewpoint that labels anyone who disagrees with this viewpoint as immoral and of lower personal character. I also view her as an extremist because she spouts “statistics” and “facts” without really examining if those statistics and facts meet the test of simple logic, which means her belief is unexamined and also unchallengeable. After all, how do you challenge someone’s viewpoint once they have chosen to simply accept whatever data they are fed by their ‘leader’ without any critical thinking?

This is where I got into trouble with her. She was sharing her views and statistics, and I lost my ability to smile and remain silent. And of course, that loss is why I feel like an epic failure right now. I’m not okay with losing my patience with someone and arguing against their opinion. I’m not supposed to speak sternly to a client, ever. I’m not okay when I act like this whether it happens with clients or just with people in general. Sadly, I find myself behaving like this often enough for me to be embarrassed to admit to it.

It’s my birthday today, and I keep hoping that my increasing age will grant me greater amounts of patience, compassion, silence (oh how I could use some ability to remain silent!), and wisdom. While I often get really nice presents for my birthday, God has not yet chosen to shower me with the gifts of patience, silence, and wisdom. I don’t know that I actually need to be more compassionate that I am, but I often think that I would be better at tolerating extremist viewpoints or just generally stupid behaviors and viewpoints if I was more compassionate.

Then again, maybe if I didn’t give a damn that would help too.

But I digress.

I keep waiting to grow up, to become more of all the things I thought I would become with age. It isn’t happening, at least not the way I want it to. I won’t deny that age has granted me a number of characteristics that I didn’t possess at 22. I told my oldest daughter not long ago that the greatest gift of aging is that you calm the hell down. Actually, I think I said it more colorfully than that. Nonetheless, I have calmed down a great deal since my 20s. I have also become a bit more comfortable with having others tell me that I have screwed up. Sometime in my 30s I decided that being wrong isn’t as horrible as we like to make it out to be. Discovering you are wrong is embarrassing and it hurts your pride a little, but only just a little, as long as you don’t act like you’re being accused of a capital crime and start defending yourself as if your life was on the line. The truth is that being wrong represents an opportunity to learn from someone, to thank them for their honest feedback, and to prove yourself to be a responsible and accountable adult. Oh yeah…and you get to be certain, at least for a moment, that you are now just a little ‘righter’ than you were a minute ago. Nice, huh?

Growing older has also granted me the wisdom of realizing that things are never as great or as bad as they seem, and that I need to step back and let things unfold, instead of going straight into freak-out mode. I used to freak-out over the slightest little thing that didn’t go well…now I moan a little and grump a bit, and then get on with dealing with whatever it was that just happened. I suppose that this could come under the heading of ‘Calm the hell down’ but it also contains a great big piece of ‘Look for the good to show up, because God always sneaks in a little good into everything’. God has a funny habit of blessing me even in the midst of the ickier parts of life, which has led me to start looking for the hidden blessings in just about everything.

You know, considering just how much aging has blessed me with already, I guess that it’s reasonable to hope that sometime in the next 30 years, God will sneak a little patience, silence, and wisdom into this hard head of mine. Maybe He’ll drop a little more compassion into my heart just for fun as well. In fact, perhaps this particular epic failure will contain the seeds of great things…a few more hidden blessings from God.

So for my birthday, it appears that God has gifted me with hope that I’m still growing up and growing wise, and that is a very nice present indeed. Well played, God. Well played.

My friend saw an article about marriage on the Internet the other day and wanted my opinion. The article was from Relevant, a Christian magazine, and it was titled “Marriage Isn’t About Your Happiness.” **

My friend asked me to read the article and then give her my opinion. She felt as if the article basically stated that marriage is about giving and your happiness shouldn’t be a factor. I can see how she might see it that way, and it would be easy to read the article and think the author was advocating for endless self-sacrifice for the sake of your partner.

And she is advocating for endless self-sacrifice…but not in the way you think. I think a quote from the author might clear things up a bit.

“I heard a married man on TV say (regarding whether or not he was going to stay in his own marriage), “I shouldn’t be with someone if I’m not happy.” It’s an attitude many people have, and hearing it made my stomach turn.

What an accurate reflection of the self-centered society we live in, everyone believing their main goal in life is their own personal happiness. What a small and shallow way to live.

If you’re getting married with your own happiness as your main goal, you will be disappointed in a severe way.

Marriage is not about your happiness, it’s not even about you. It’s about love—which is something we choose to give time and time again. It’s about sacrifice, serving, giving, forgiving—and then doing it all over again.” **

You can see how my friend, who has been in a few failed relationships, would question the author’s assertion that happiness is what marriage is about, especially when you consider that it was her unhappiness that finally gave her the strength to leave her spouse.

But the author’s main point is summarized easily. “If you are getting married with your own happiness as your main goal, you will be disappointed in a severe way.” You got that straight! As a matter of fact, when my husband and I were getting married, a thrice married coworker of my husband told him “Marriage is either the best thing that happens to you or it is hell on earth.” Again, you got that straight!

Before I can proceed, I probably need to state a few personal beliefs that I live by, because without stating that, I stand to be just as misunderstood as the author of the article mentioned above.

You are responsible for meeting your own needs. The only time someone else assumes that role is while you are too young or too old and feeble to care for yourself. Any other time, you are fully responsible for yourself and meeting your own needs.

You are responsible for making yourself happy. We human beings essentially choose our own emotions based on our thoughts. No one can ‘make’ you feel anything until they have a gun pointed at your head…then they are capable of forcing you to feel something, which is usually crushing fear and desperation. Most people don’t have a gun pointed at your head, which means that no one can ‘make’ (force) you to feel anything, which also means that someone else cannot ‘make’ you happy. If you want to be happy, that’s your responsibility.

You are responsible for contributing to the health and stability of your partnership/ marriage, but remember that you are only ½ the team. If one member of the couple no longer contributes to the health and stability of the relationship in any way (and they are doing that on purpose, by choice, and not because of terminal illness or disability) then you are NOT in a relationship at all.

Okay, having said all those things, the author is right. Marriage is not about your happiness. It’s not that marriage cannot contribute to your happiness, because it can. But marriage, in itself, is not about making you happy. Saying that marriage is about your personal happiness is akin to saying that going to college is about your personal success. Sure, going to college can contribute to your personal success, but if you go to college and then sit on your butt and refuse to work hard and continue learning, you are probably going to fail in the long run.

What I’m trying to say is that getting married isn’t a magic tonic that confers ‘happiness’. Marriage is a commitment that requires you to sacrifice for the sake of your partner which, by definition, will sometimes not be a happy thing. That’s why it’s called SACRIFICE. Shortly after my husband and I moved to Phoenix, my favorite band announced their tour dates and their date in Phoenix fell on the weekend of my husband’s 10th high school reunion in Indiana. So, which is it? See my favorite band in concert, or go to Indiana with my husband who wanted me to meet his friends? When it came time to decide, I had two thoughts. First, there is only ONE 10th reunion, only one chance to go back to high school and laugh in the face of everyone who called you nerd-boy, now that you are a successful engineer with a nice house and pretty wife. Second…oh hell, there is no second point. I decided to be a wife and go to Indiana with my husband. I missed the concert and it made me unhappy to do so, but 27 years later what I value was that I chose my husband’s happiness over my own that day. It’s not always about his happiness when I sacrifice for him. I have cared for both of his parents as they died, and that was definitely NOT about happiness. Again, it was about choosing to be a wife, to be the woman who sees my husband’s needs and does my best to meet those needs. It would be a bitter pill to swallow for me if I was the only one who sacrificed in our relationship, but my husband constantly sacrifices for me. This is the man who paid for my seminary education so that I could follow God’s call. This is the man who committed to go wherever the bishop sent us, no matter how that would impact his career. This is the man who stopped on the way home from work one night to fix my parent’s leaky tub…and brought a huge flower arrangement to leave for my mom because my father was in the hospital after having had a stroke that morning. She came home from the hospital to find the flowers and no leaky tub…and he never said a word to me or to her about what he was going to do. I call that choosing to be a husband, choosing to see be the kind of man who sees his wife’s needs and does his best to meet those needs.

And that’s where the happiness in marriage actually comes in.

When we sacrifice for each other, it’s not the sacrifice itself that leads to feelings of happiness. It’s that the sacrifice is tangible evidence of the depth of our commitment to each other, our desire to serve each other, and our deep desire to have a positive and lasting impact on our spouse. We love each other and so we strive to make the world a better, softer place for our partner. It’s not that different than the feeling we have when we sacrifice for our children. We know it’s the right thing to do and we know it’s hard, but we also desire for our kids to feel secure in our love and care for them; we want them to feel safe in the world simply because we are there to help them. Marriage is about creating a deep sense of being loved and valued for who you are; it creates a sense of security and safety.

Marriage is a strange exchange. It calls for you to become less self-centered even as it forces you to take responsibility for your own happiness and for meeting your own needs. It simultaneously calls for you to be invested in emotional, physical, and spiritual self-care, while asking you to give and serve and sacrifice for your partner. When both members of the couple behave in this way, marriage becomes a haven of rest and release and true contentment and peace; it is the place where you can be truly vulnerable and frail and know that you are loved. A good marriage is like Miracle Grow for the soul.

When only one member of the couple is willing to practice self-giving, it becomes a hell of endless servitude and diminishing of self in the service of your partner’s throbbing ego, which demands adoration and abject devotion. The marriage becomes destructive to the serving partner who can never give away enough of themselves to satisfy their partner; it is truly psychologically damaging, and I have spent many hours working with the broken partner from an unequally yoked marriage. Inevitably it is the partner with the larger ego who always speaks the words “I shouldn’t be with someone if I’m not happy.” The lament of the self-giving partner is also inevitable: “It was never enough, no matter what I did.”

If you are reading this and realize that you will never be enough, no matter what you do, get help and if you can, get out. It’s not about your happiness. It’s about your SELF. God created you and you are enough, and anyone who causes you to believe otherwise is slowly destroying your soul. Don’t let anything, no matter how precious it is to you, destroy you. You are of sacred worth and you deserve to be whole and healthy; destroying your soul in the pursuit of making your partner happy is not the road to health and wholeness. Please, get the help you need, and then get out of that relationship.

If you are reading this and wondering if you will ever find someone capable of giving to you in the same way that you are willing to give, then I encourage you to just keep working on yourself. Become healthier and healthier. Work on the condition of your soul and on the peacefulness that can be found in gratitude, faith and mindfulness. Work on being as responsible for yourself, your needs, and your happiness as you can possibly be. It is important to know that we draw partners to ourselves that have similar levels of emotional health and wellness, so the healthier you are, the healthier your partner will be. Can I be sure that there is a partner for you? No, I can’t. What I can be sure of is that any work you do on yourself pays off in dividends that are reaped across your lifetime with friends and family as well as in your relationship with your partner. So get busy making your life into a wonderful place of self-care, responsibility, gratitude, faith, friends, and service…and then see what comes your way. You’ll already be happy, so it won’t be like you’ll be waiting for a partner to make you happy. So why would you need a partner? Because…why not?

You see, last week I preached for a friend so that he could take some time off. I’ve preached for him before and so his congregation is familiar with me. Familiarity helps when you’re doing pulpit supply, and it makes the congregation feel better too, so there I was for Memorial Day weekend.

I got there early so that I could get settled and say hello to the folks as they came through the door. One parishioner, I’ll call him Dave, got there only a few moments after I did so that he could hand out the bulletins and greet folks at the door.

I talked with Dave about how he’d been since I’d last seen him and about the weather, which was hot and dry even up in the mountains. I knew there was a brush fire nearby and had seen the smoke as I drove into town. I’d also heard about the fire on the news and so I knew that locals were very concerned about what was being released into the air by the fire. The long and short of it was that this area of forest hadn’t burned in decades, not since the government had used Agent Orange to reduce the chaparral and increase water flow for the Salt River Project.**

Now that the area that had been deforested was burning, the locals were alarmed at the dioxins that might be released into the air by the fire. I asked Dave if he had heard anything from the fire service or the local government and he immediately started shaking his head. “Oh yeah, we heard from them all right. They told us we have nothing to worry about. They’re lying to us and we know it…lying right to our faces.”

I can’t blame Dave for feeling the way he does, even though I can’t be sure that the fire service or the government is actually lying. And the truth is that we won’t find out for a long time, and if we do find out, it will be because the local citizens start getting sick in record numbers…and the lies will have cost them their health and maybe even their lives.

We’ve all seen it happen: something goes terribly wrong, and the government or the giant corporation sends some official representative to assure the public that everything is going to be just fine. They come to us dressed in finely tailored suits, armed with smiles and slick lies.

It’s the attack of the lying suits.

Erin Brockovich. Michael Clayton. Silkwood. All The President’s Men. Syrianna…every last one of these movies tells the true story of corporate or governmental lies and coverups that cost the American people dearly. We know the story of the lying suit so well, that stories about striking back at the lying suits have become a part of what we call entertainment.

And this…THIS is how we got Donald Trump as President.

I have been trying for months to find a way to understand Trump voters. I have listened to them try to explain why they like Trump and it hasn’t helped at all…until Dave.

Huge numbers of Americans, many of them working poor, are sick to death of the lying suits. They have come to believe that any person who comes with a suit and a smile cannot be trusted. They have been lied to and cheated. They’ve lost their homes to the financial crisis and the greed of multinational banks. They’ve have had their property devalued and their health destroyed by corporate dumping and the subsequent pollution of the soil and ground water. They have been told that fracking doesn’t harm the environment even after they told the lying suits that they could turn their kitchen faucets into blowtorches simply by turning them on and then lighting a match next to the faucet. They have been told that the city’s water infrastructure was fine even though the levels of lead in the water were off the charts.

It’s not as if lives were at stake. Okay, lives were at stake, but they weren’t important lives because no one whose life was at stake was wearing a well-tailored suit and a smile.

And then along came a rich man in a well-tailored suit, with a slick smile…

And he talked in the exact same way as the-people-who-are-sick-of the-lying-suits like to talk. And he railed against the government, just like the-people-who-are-sick-of the-lying-suits rail against the government. He said unkind, politically incorrect things, just like the-people-who-are-sick-of the-lying-suits wish they could say to the lying suits. He publicly ridiculed the lying suits and he refused to play nice with them no matter how hard the lying suits tried to get him to do what was expected of him if he was going to play politics.

He did everything that the-people-who-are-sick-of the-lying-suits want to do but can’t do because they don’t have the money or the power or the prestige to get anyone to listen or pay attention to them.

This is why we have Donald Trump as President.

And you can’t really blame the-people-who-are-sick-of the-lying-suits, can you? Because those of us who didn’t vote for Donald Trump deal with those same lying suits every day.

We work for them. They are usually our boss’s boss. And we don’t like the lying suits very much either. They tend to screw us out of our pension, or deny us the benefits they promised us if we would only work for them for 20+ years, or lay us off along with 4,000 of our coworkers, all while taking their million dollar bonus for keeping the company profitable.

I think I finally beginning to understand.

I don’t like the man who the-people-who-are-sick-of the-lying-suits elected, but I am beginning to understand why they thought he would be a better choice than Hillary, who (let’s be honest) sometimes looks an awful lot like all the other lying suits.

I may not agree with their choice, but if I can understand why they made their choice, maybe I can find compassion for how they feel, and if I can find compassion for how they feel, maybe we can finally start a dialogue about how best to unite and move forward.

I think I am finally beginning to understand, and it’s the first ray of hope I’ve had in a while.

Like, epic busy. Ridiculously busy. I have been so busy that I am on the precipice of becoming crazy busy, which means that I will be unkind, unloving, and unreasonable.

Perhaps that’s not fully the truth, because if you ask my husband I’ve already been unkind, unloving, and incredibly unreasonable, but not consistently. Right now I am just unkind, unloving, and unreasonable in spurts, which thankfully my husband can bear for short periods of time.

Despite his patience with me, I hate when I get so busy that I’m not a nice lady anymore, especially when I am not nice to my own husband.

Back to my point. I’ve been really busy doing work for the Church. Not that I haven’t had work for my counseling practice; that’s always a thing. It’s just that I’ve been doing more work than normal for the Church.

I’d love to go into details because when I start listing all I’ve been doing, other people get that look on their face that says “Oh dear God…seriously? I’d EXPLODE if I had to do that! I’d lose my MIND if I had to do that!” and then, of course, they ask how the heck I’m doing all that.

I told my girlfriend that my work for the Church has me up to my a** in alligators. After listening to my frustration, she corrected me and told me that at this point, the alligators have taken up residence in my a** and I should start charging rent.

I like the way that lady thinks and have to admit that having alligators in my a** might explain why I have been unkind, unloving, and unreasonable.

Seriously, though, how did I get into this predicament?

I have had a number of people tell me that I need to learn to say NO when it comes to requests for assistance.

There is some wisdom in that, because being able to set boundaries is a huge part of healthy living.

The thing is that you don’t always get the opportunity to say no. What do you do when the cost of saying NO can be the integrity of the project that everyone is working to complete? What do you do when no one asks if you would be willing to do something…and instead just tells you that they need you to do this?

What do you do when you feel like NO isn’t an option?

There is no easy answer to this question, but I am learning where the line is that demands that I say NO.

You see, I am one of those people who is really pleased with my own efficiency, my ability to get things done when things are on the line. I like to be the person that everyone relies on, the one that people turn to when the going gets tough.

There is nothing wrong with knowing what you are good at and making sure that others know what you are good at…on the other hand, it gives me a huge sense of pride to be doing all that I am doing, and a huge sense of martyrdom to be working as hard as I am working, and neither of those things is good for my ego.

It makes me an idiot to think I am more committed, more dedicated than everyone else in my position. It makes me haughty to believe that I am sacrificing myself for the sake of the group. It makes me…unhealthy.

What the heck am I supposed to do?

I guess that I should break this into pieces and look at each piece. Let’s start with “It makes me haughty to believe that I am sacrificing myself for the sake of the group.”

There is never a time when haughtiness, or extreme pride, is good.

Pride in itself is not bad. Pride is that thing that allows you to feel good about the things you do, what you are able to achieve and what your abilities allow you to contribute to the mix. I like to be good at what I do, and being good at what I do allows me to be proud of myself.

Hello, self-esteem!

There is nothing wrong with self-esteem. Self-esteem, however, is based in the idea that I give the best that I can to any given task so that I can succeed as much as I am able. It isn’t based in anything other than my own ability and my awareness that sometimes I am exactly what is needed to get things done.

On the other hand, extreme pride, or haughtiness, causes me to think that I am better than others.

What does that mean, to be “better than others”?

Is that a permanent thing, or am I only better than others at this particular moment?

When I’m better than others, does that mean something concrete or is it only relative to the people I’m working with at this moment, and the project I’m working on at this particular moment, and the needs of the group at this particular moment?

Are you seeing where I’m going here? Being better than others is always relative to the project at hand, the people doing the work, and this particular moment. In other words, I can be better than others at what we are doing right now but I cannot be better than others, period. I cannot excel past my brothers and sisters once I step outside this particular project and this particular moment.

Being ‘better than others’ is so limited to a specific place and time as to be meaningless.

Self-esteem, the awareness that I have done well when people were relying on me…self-esteem is just as time bound as haughtiness, but self-esteem’s location in time cannot erase the reality that I did the right thing at the right time for the people who relied on me. The good thing about self-esteem is that it doesn’t rely on what others are doing, just on whether or not I fulfilled my task and helped the people that God set before me.

But what does that have to do with saying NO to too much work?

Well, if I need to be better than others, if I need to fulfill my haughty need for perfection and being ‘better-than’, there is no such thing as saying NO. I can’t say NO, because I have to better-than-others and people who are better-than-others do not say NO. Only mere mortals say NO.

Self-esteem on the other hand lets me say NO when NO is the most reasonable answer. Self-esteem lets me say NO when I am not able to fulfill the task in a way that will be satisfying to everyone involved. You see, self-esteem doesn’t like to fail any more than haughtiness does, but self-esteem will admit when the job is too big or too difficult or beyond our abilities right now…because self-esteem can say “I can do a lot but there is no way that I can do this thing you are asking” and not feel like it has lost anything. Haughtiness and extreme pride need to be the best every time, all the time, and there is no space for NO there.

The last three months has been a lesson for me. I can do way more than I thought I could, so much more than I thought I could. I can be busier than is good for me for extended periods of time and not fail. On the other hand, it has also taught me that my self-esteem is much stronger than I thought it was and my self-esteem is ready to say Enough!!! and slow things down. It’s nice to be efficient and it’s nice to be relied upon, but I have no interest in letting myself buy into the bull poop that haughtiness would like to sell me.

I guess what I want to tell you is that there is a fine line between self-esteem and haughtiness and that only YOU can determine where that line is. Only YOU can figure out where the line is between being healthy and being pride-filled, and that means that no one else can tell you when to say NO.

It is only January 13 and I have run into my limits. Admitting those limits, as much as it will chap my behind, can only be a good thing.

This year my resolution is to stay with self-esteem and kick haughtiness to the curb.

I’ll let you know how I’m doing with this NO thing in the coming weeks. I pray that my ego gets out of the way and lets my self-esteem have a breather.

Even though we just finished a season of ‘too much to do’, I am personally in another season of ‘way too much to do’.

You’d think that the end of December would be the end of stress, but that’s not the way it works for me.

It’s a long story, but let’s just say that serving the Church can keep you so busy that it’s hard to tell the difference between the Christmas season and any other month of the year.

Enough said.

Anyway…

As I mentioned in a previous post, my daughters both moved away during the holiday season. My oldest moved away to Colorado on the day after Thanksgiving, only one scant week after her sister’s wedding. And my youngest left for Portland, Oregon on January 2nd. Ugh. I’d barely finished putting my oldest back on the plane to CO and celebrating the New Year when I had to get my baby packed into her car, a UHaul trailer, and a huge dually pickup truck. Thank God that my daughter’s in-laws are wonderful helpers, or I think my head would have exploded!

Back to my scheduled programming, which focuses on too much to do and too many emotions.

You would think that the last thing I’d want to do after baking for 36 people and feeding 17 for Christmas is MORE work, but that’s exactly what I turned to once my daughter and her husband had pulled away from the condo they were living in to head for Oregon.

My heart was breaking and all I could think about was socks.

Sprinkle Socks.

You may be wondering what the heck I’m talking about.

Let me share the joy of Sprinkle Socks.

Sprinkle Socks are socks that have a fringe of beads crocheted onto them. They make noise when you walk, and they are vibrantly colored. You can make Sprinkle Socks to match every single outfit you own…but then again you probably would refuse to wear them if you were over the age of 11.

Sprinkle Socks are something I made for my little girls back in the day.

I crocheted on the plane to CA as I traveled to seminary. My daughters were 2 and 5 years old when I started seminary, and I made them Sprinkle Socks in every color imaginable while I sat in the airport or on the plane. By the time I finished seminary, my daughters were seven and ten years old and I had made them many more pairs of Sprinkle Socks because they kept growing out of the old ones. It was the perfect craft project: once they fell in love with Sprinkle Socks, it wasn’t like they could live without them, so I had to keep making larger and larger pairs.

As I watched my adult daughters pack their lives into boxes and moving trucks, all I could think about was all the things I had done to take care of them and bring them joy…and how they wouldn’t need that from me anymore.

I guess I could have just invested in sadness and spent my next few months crying and pouting. Instead I invested in tri-beads, crochet needles, crochet twine, and crew socks from Target. (I have to admit that I did have a few tearful meltdowns, but each one lasted only a few minutes and I’ve only had three or four meltdowns since October 2016.)

On the day my youngest was leaving for Oregon, my husband and I arrived with coffee for all four of us. We spent our entire morning at the condo helping them helping them find anything critical that wasn’t already packed and load the few remaining items of big furniture. Katie and her husband were frantic, trying to do and remember everything. It seemed like it took a long time, but suddenly it was over and Katie and her new husband left in her overstuffed car, headed for their new life in Portland, OR.

All I could think about was getting to Target to buy a package of socks so that I could get started.

You would think that with all the baking, cooking, cleaning, wrapping and packing that I had to do during the holidays that the LAST thing I would want is another project to complete.

NOPE…it’s exactly what I want.

Sure it’s a distraction from the sadness that I’m feeling, except that it’s more than a distraction.

I become genuinely happy thinking about the Sprinkle Socks.

They remind me of all the things I did to make my daughters happy. They remind me of the dozens of pairs I crocheted for other little girls, knowing that their Sprinkle Socks would be their favorite socks.

They remind me of the myriad of ways that I can use my skills to create joy and pleasure for others.

They let me do the thing that gives me the most meaning in my life—serving others—with the added bonus that I get to be creative.

Do you ever think that God created humans to be creative just so that we could discover that joy that God felt when God created US???

I do.

I can make you Sprinkle Socks in every color in the rainbow and even a few colors that aren’t found in nature. I can make Sprinkle Socks for babies only a few months old, and I can make Sprinkle Socks for girls that are already in Middle School. I can crochet Sprinkle Socks that have glitter beads! You cannot believe what I can do with a few beads and a pair of crew socks.

I think that the overwhelming joy that I feel as I crochet each bead onto the Sprinkle Socks is the exact same joy that God felt as He created trees and flowers, as He created grass and mountains, as He created every human being with all the different skin and hair and eye colors, as He created the world with infinite variation in trees, mountains, plants, animals, and people.

God created so that we might have everything in abundance and find joy in all of it.

I create so that some little girl might have socks in abundance and find joy in that.

It isn’t near as impressive or massive as God’s work, but it is an echo of God’s creativity, and I’ll take anything that will allow me to glimpse into the mind of God.

If crocheting Sprinkle Socks is any indication of what God’s mind is like, God is very calm and extremely happy.

In light of all that’s gone on in the last month, I’ll take all the calm and happy I can get. If you are looking for me you will find me on the couch, crocheting Sprinkle Socks.